Thom Yorke's swearing ends up on a loop in Berkeley

Thom Yorke's swearing, and the laughter of 8,500 people at it, went round and round on a loop in “Give Up the Ghost” on Tuesday, the second of Radiohead's two sold-out nights at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley. The song opened the first encore, and the band played on with the laughter repeating behind them like a sitcom laugh track.

David Brendan Hall of Buzzbands.la, who was there, puts it down to accident. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood missed a transition near the end of the song, Yorke's loop pedal seemed to stick, and he said Aw sheeeeeeit¹ into the microphone. The room laughed, and the band started the loop again without stopping, so the new loop caught the laughter. Rolling Stone Italia tells it as a joke by Jonny, who caught the swear on his sampler and looped it over the backing while Yorke tried to pick the song back up.

They were the band's first nights at the Greek Theatre since the warm-up shows before In Rainbows in June 2006. Both nights began with the same four songs, but across the two the band played 23 songs they had left out of the first Coachella weekend, with the second still to come. Tuesday leaned on the quiet ones, from “Separator” and “Videotape” early on to “Nude” and “Karma Police” at the end.

Monday began with a microphone turned to face the audience. Yorke waved for more noise, then turned it back and started “Daydreaming” with the crowd's recording looped inside it. “The Tourist” closed the first encore, its second outing of the tour after Miami, where it had come back for the first time since 2008. In “No Surprises” the crowd roared at the line about bringing down the government, and the band played a couple of extra bars without vocals to let the applause run. Twice Yorke asked whether the band could bring them all to Coachella, a joke about the sound failures there on Friday.

A few songs into that first night, Yorke asked, How many alt-right members are there in the audience tonight? Because you can fuck right off.³ The crowd cheered. Nick Miller, reviewing the night for the East Bay Express, tied it to Saturday's brawl in Berkeley between far-right groups and Black Bloc anarchists.

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